I wish you people could see the graveyard of abandoned posts I have in my WordPress drafts folder. It’s a very sad folder, filled with half thoughts, nuggets of ideas, and bits of wisdom I wanted to share, but never finished. They eventually became irrelevant or uninteresting to me or just lost. I think one of my new year’s resolutions should be shorter posts that I can finish writing in a single sitting. Not that that’s relevant to today’s post. I just wanted to mention it as I thought of it.
November has come and gone. November brought a fabulous turkey with even better bourbon-cranberry sauce, the remains of my pneumonia (which had me taking a medicine that I couldn’t take within two hours of calcium, which meant a crazed planning of the timing of my milky coffee, which meant I’d often not be human until close to lunch time), and of course NaNoWriMo.
Nanowrimo is done my friends. And, yes, I am a…
I confess, I had extra motivation this year. About halfway through I started experimenting with the program Scrivener. And I am completely hooked. I don’t even use most of the features, but the ability to easily jump back and forth between chapters and even scenes (as opposed to either keeping the entire novel in a single Word doc or opening forty Word docs and scrolling them individually to find my place) was amazing. But I used it on a trial basis. And had to win NaNoWriMo. Because Scrivener promised 50% off for winners (coupon to come soon!). So that was the motivation.
But happily, I didn’t need too much of a motivational push. Because I’m definitely into my new story. I’m loving my visits to the 1930s (the novel takes place in August of 1935). The research has been fun and it’s a new form of escapism, retreating to a world where my protagonist doesn’t even have a phone, never mind an iPad 2. The novel is a mess, in total disarray. I realized midway that I need to restructure it, but that’s what December is for. I need to step back and look at the arc of the plot and figure out how to play with the tension and form to get it where it needs to be. I actually was quite surprised at how the book turned out. I thought for sure I knew what my main character was going to do–if you recall I had actually plotted this out ahead of time–and she completely surprised me! That’s the best part of writing; when things don’t go at all as planned.
Now onward to December! Time to get my hands dirty ripping this novel apart. It’s not that different from all that purging I’ve been doing. Gotta make a big ol’ mess before everything finds a place!
Congrats on your NaNoWriMo win! Was this your first year doing it? I’ve never done it before, but I’d like to try one of these years 🙂
Angela, I never responded! Bad blogger! This is my gazillionth year Nanowrimoing! Okay, maybe not quite qazillionth. But I did my first Nanowrimo in 2001, taking breaks from a few years for things like, oh, having children. I’ve won a few, I’ve lost a few. It’s always fun!